KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — In his father's presence, Kaleem knelt at attention on the blood-red carpet, his turban a cloud of white coiled atop his head.
"I wish I could do what my father did," the son said. "He drove the Russians from our country. He served his tribe well."
The father sat cross-legged on a cushion, signing papers in his lap, one ear to what Kaleem was saying, one heavy arm draped over a small boy, another son, leaning up against his big frame.
"But I also want an education," said Kaleem, shy and handsome at 18. "Before" — under the Taliban — "we couldn't go to school. But an education would help me, as a tribal leader."
Now the father spoke. "If things settle down, I'll think about sending him abroad to get educated," Mullah Naqibullah said.
And if things don't? If Afghanistan slips back into war, destruction and killings? Might Kaleem eventually take command of his father's thousands of fighters? Could he, too, be "kommandan" — warlord?
"God alone knows this," the father said.
The fraying flags hang forlorn from tall and slender bows of wood, bending beside the river Oxus in the north, above the snows in the valleys of the Hindu Kush, on the flats of the southern desert, whipped by wind. White and green, red and pink, these strips of cloth mark the graves, heaps of stone, of the "shahidan," those taken before their time. In Afghanistan, land of the warlords, the dead bear these flags beyond number.
Most estimates put the toll of those killed in Afghanistan in 23 years of war at more than 1 million, even without considering those who succumbed to malnutrition, disease and other indirect effects of war's dislocations.
The English term "warlord" gained currency early in the last century in China to describe regional military chiefs who sliced up that huge but weak land. "The whole warlord system is based on the interception of national revenue at the points where it is levied and on nothing else," a British journalist explained to readers of the time.
The same could be said of Afghanistan late in the 20th century. In fact, this weak land had warlords long before the latest siege of wars, back at least to the 18th century, when an Afghan "state" was established under a king, sitting here in Kandahar, but the territory remained a collection of skirmishing tribal fiefdoms and regional groups, jealous of their autonomy in a multi-ethnic land.
It took an upheaval, in 1978, to unite Afghans. A small cadre of communists overthrew the government and imposed new ideas — women's literacy, land redistribution, central control — on a countryside steeped in Islamic conservatism. The countryside rebelled.
The Soviet Union poured troops across its southern border to try to save communism in Afghanistan. The resistance rallied into a broad movement, the "mujahedeen," or holy warriors.
They were often tribal or ethnic militias led by self-styled generals who strutted across their pieces of mountainous Afghan landscape, dispensing money funneled to them by the Americans, Saudis and other anti-communist governments, flaunting U.S. Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, mounting attacks, often uncoordinated, on the Soviet occupiers.
These were the warlords. Some were young men, still in their 20s, like Ahmed Shah Massoud, "the Lion of Panjshir," and like the tall, youthful Muslim cleric who rose to command thousands of fellow Alikozai tribesmen in the south, around Kandahar. This was Mullah Naqibullah.
As Kaleem and every Afghan boy knows, the mujahedeen drove the Soviets out in 1989. But by the early 1990s, the warlords had turned on each other, in a civil war that devastated Kabul, the Afghan capital, and raged on into the mid-1990s.
Their turf battles grew naturally out of the lawless 1980s, when warlords' men smuggled out Afghan opium to finance their armies and levied extortionate "fees" on traders using their roads.
The Afghan people grew weary of warlords and ceaseless violence. In 1995-96, a radical Islamic army called the Taliban, supported by Pakistan, gathered strength in the countryside and rolled over one tribal militia after another. Here in Kandahar, Naqibullah surrendered without a fight and was retired to his village.
Only small pockets held out, like Rashid Dostum's fief in the north, which the fatigue-clad commander of ethnic Uzbeks equipped with its own currency, flag and airline.
Then, last October, the United States brought its war on terror to Afghanistan, to hunt down the al-Qaida terrorists and punish the Taliban government for protecting them. The Americans enlisted a platoon of warlords to their cause.
As the Taliban teetered under ground and air attack, Naqibullah summoned his fighters, some 7,000 strong, from their villages. This time, on Dec. 6, it was Naqibullah who took the Taliban's surrender without a fight.
The Taliban's defeat left behind an Afghanistan again carved into fiefs and enclaves, some ruled by commanders with official positions, such as provincial governor, some whose borders are demarcated simply by checkpoints manned by glowering young militiamen with AK-47s.
The warlords of 2002 can be spotted from afar, arriving in clouds of dust in their favored SUVs, black Toyota Land Cruisers with dark-tinted glass, followed by pickup trucks crowded with gunmen, grenade launchers protruding from windows.
Today's warlords come in all sizes — province down to neighborhood. A swagger stick-wielding man in uniform, with 20 armed followers, took command of a Kandahar police precinct for a while earlier this year, a lucrative fief, in defiance of police headquarters.
The new sign of warlord status, in place of Stinger missiles, is the satellite telephone, especially the pocket-size Thuraya, supplied to favored Afghan commanders by the Americans. The phone bills, for calls to the next warlord or the next continent, are mysteriously paid somewhere. One commander even cruises his domain of donkey carts and mud-walled homes with a satellite-driven computer telling him his precise location on the planet.
Protective of their powers and income sources, and of their partnerships with a U.S. military pressing "search-and-destroy" missions in the mountains, the warlords and their rivalries have many worried, not just Afghans, in this post-Taliban period.
"Clearly the major overall challenge is how to prevent a return to warlordism and conflict," as a fragile new government tries to assert itself, commented the American special envoy to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad.
The "ultimate answer," he said, is the building of a national army.
Like many men in this exhausted land, Mullah Naqibullah looks older than his 48 years — in his long salt-and-pepper beard, high forehead under gray turban, slow manner. His right lid droops at times behind his eyeglasses. He says he suffers from a neurological condition.
He was wounded three times in the "Russian war," not counting the odd shard of shrapnel that pierced him here and there. His eyes brighten nonetheless at talk of those days.
"My men and I killed 3,000 Russians," he said. And he personally? "No one killed as many as me," he boasted. "I took out 200 tanks with my rocket launchers."
Whatever the actual count, it was his battlefield prowess — not his heredity, as the son of a teacher of Islam — that gained Naqibullah leadership of the Alikozai.
As he spoke this day, third day of the Eid al-Adha religious feast, old comrades-in-arms, bearded men with leathery faces, trooped in and out of the red-draped reception room, offering holiday greetings to their tribal chief.
His black Land Cruisers waited outside. But since the Taliban's fall, Naqibullah has declared himself inactive and turned his militia over to a trusted lieutenant, who plans its gradual integration into a national army.
By "retiring," Naqibullah allowed a longtime rival from another tribe, the rough-edged warlord Gul Agha of the Barakzai, to reclaim the Kandahar governorship he held before the Taliban. Some take Naqibullah at his word when he says his health was his concern. Some think he awaits an important position in a new central government.
"I've quit," he said. "I have some farmland. I have a gas station. I still have chieftainship of the tribe."
Habibullah Jan was 16 when he took up a gun in 1978 and joined the "holy war." His father, a tribal leader, had been imprisoned by the new communist regime. "He's still missing," Habibullah notes, for the record.
Today Haji Habibullah is a heavyset man, with soft black beard, who chain-smokes Marlboro Lights through thick fingers. He is, in effect, a brigade commander for Naqibullah, with more than 2,000 men in his charge. His entire adult life has been spent in fighting and exile, victory and defeat.
"We finally drove the Russians out, and the communist government collapsed. But our bad luck was that the mujahedeen came into power. They can't sit down together," Habibullah said. "The second bit of bad luck was that the countries that supported us abandoned us."
Now that the Americans are back, Habibullah said, the "international community" must help finance and train a new national army, to impose order on a disorderly map. "I hope that will mean the end of the warlords."
These mornings, Habibullah's men shuffle through the dust, marching, drilling, learning the discipline of a professional army. But his militiamen and others recruited to the new army are short on trainers, equipment, facilities. They're not even being paid yet; most don't have uniforms.
They're months from being able to face down any serious challenge, and Afghanistan's post-Taliban unity is already under challenge in the north, where the warlord Dostum's Uzbeks have been plundering the homes of the region's minority Pashtuns. Many have fled to Kandahar and elsewhere in the Pashtun heartland.
The challenges lie not just in the north, however, or on a large scale. Down the road from Habibullah's headquarters, his own fighters are in a standoff with armed men loyal to another commander, over control of a stretch of main highway.
Along such fault lines is the map of warlords drawn.
"Those who would disturb this country — from inside or outside, foreign or Afghan — they are not going to succeed!" the imam declared. "Because this is God's country!"
Thousands of men, a field of plaids and stripes in the quiet grays and greens of Pashtun shawls, heard the clergyman's passionate words this holiday morning beneath the sky-blue dome of Kandahar's Eid Mosque.
Beyond the fringe of the congregation, a line of beggars stretched inward from a main gate, mostly legless men, land mine victims, lying on the ground in dusty rags, palms upraised. The few women in sight, in this sex-segregated society, sat outside the gate, arrayed against a wall in the dirt, supplicants hidden head to toe in filthy blue burqas.
Inside the great mosque, the service's main speaker soon rose — the governor Gul Agha, a bearded bull of a man tightly buttoned up in a military uniform, dress greens.
"We are all mujahedeen, and sons of mujahedeen," the warlord declared. "These are all soldiers you see," he said, gesturing out over the throng.
Gul Agha had fought the Russians as a mujahed under his father, a renowned Barakzai warlord. His reward, as a young man, was the Kandahar governorship. But that rich prize was wrested from him by the Taliban. Now he is back in charge, with secretive Americans in sunglasses often by his side.
On this Eid al-Adha, the most joyful of Muslim holidays, Gul Agha spoke of a new Afghanistan. "I want to stop the bloodshed," he proclaimed. Now, Gul Agha said, he wanted to build "a strong Afghanistan."
A morning drizzle was falling feebly on the mosque's vast courtyard, doing nothing for the drought gripping the land. As the service wore on, the sun broke through above the jagged ridges ringing Kandahar, and soon the flags of the shahidan were dry again, and the damp earth was dust beneath the wheels of the Toyotas.